Self-Taught Art

Telfair Museums currently holds more than one hundred works by twentieth century and later artists of the American South who, without access to formal visual arts training, created complex works that express intensely personal visions rooted in individual experience, spirituality, or community, and demonstrate inventive use of imagery and materials. This collection is particularly strong in in works created in Georgia and the Savannah area. Telfair acquired its first modern work by a self-taught artist by donation in 1946 and has exhibited works by artists without formal training since 1977, when the museum hosted the seminal exhibition Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art 1770-1976. By the 1990s, Telfair began actively acquiring work by living self-taught artists, and the collection now includes drawings, paintings, sculpture, and mixed media works dating from the 1930s to the present, by noted artists including Howard Finster, Thornton Dial, Sr., Nellie Mae Rowe, Bessie Harvey, Eddie Mumma, Ulysses Davis, and William O. Golding. One subset of nineteen works in the collection focuses on the work of African American woodcarvers in the Savannah area who produced symbolic and narrative walking sticks. Another important group within the collection are twenty-three drawings made in Savannah by the mariner and artist William O. Golding.